Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns is an American artist whose paintings, prints, and sculptures use familiar signs such as flags, targets, and maps. His work blurs distinctions between an image and the object bearing it.

Flag (Jasper Johns painting): A 1954–55 encaustic painting by Jasper Johns depicting the American flag. Its flag image exemplifies how Johns turns a recognizable symbol into the subject and surface of a painting.
Abstract Expressionism: A postwar art movement associated with large-scale abstraction and expressive, gestural painting. Johns’s recognizable motifs offered a pointed alternative to the movement’s emphasis on abstract gesture.
False Start: A 1959 painting by Jasper Johns that layers colored brushstrokes with written color names. Its mismatched words and painted hues expose conflicts between naming, seeing, and painting.
Pop art: An art movement that used imagery and subjects drawn from mass culture and consumer life. Johns’s use of familiar signs helped make recognizable imagery newly available to avant-garde painting.
Target with Four Faces: A 1955 assemblage by Jasper Johns combining a painted target with a hinged box of plaster face casts. It joins one of Johns’s recurring signs to concealed bodily forms.
Robert Rauschenberg: An American artist known for combining painting with everyday objects and printed imagery. Rauschenberg was Johns’s partner and close artistic contemporary during their formative years in New York.
Canvas: A sturdy fabric surface commonly used to support paintings. Johns’s flag paintings make the support and the depicted image difficult to separate.
Neo-Dada: A postwar art tendency that joined everyday materials and imagery with experimental artistic practices. Johns’s objects and signs were associated with Neo-Dada’s challenge to conventional divisions between art and life.
Three Flags: A 1958 painting by Jasper Johns showing three superimposed American flags in encaustic. Its stacked flags make a familiar image occupy the painting as a physical object.
Leo Castelli: An influential New York art dealer who opened his gallery in 1957. Castelli’s gallery gave Johns an important platform after his early work attracted attention.

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